Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday May 07, 2010 @04:05PM
from the as-long-as-we-don't-have-to-blow-on-the-contacts dept.

sk8pmp writes "With the cost of solid state memory going down, will we see the return of the game cartridge? Or will digital distribution reign supreme and transition our entertainment into the cloud? This editorial explores the beginnings of the cartridge vs. disc battle of the '90s and theorizes a second one in the future. 'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"? You pop the game into the top of the console, so the game is sticking out the top like in ye olden times, and you could see the sweet artwork on the front of the cartridge. The nostalgia is killing me!'"

Blowing is a horribly inefficient way to clean cartridges. It's not much better than just pulling out the cartridge and reseating it, and over time, the humidity in your breath can make the problem worse by attracting more dust. If your console's cartridges don't have those idiotic tiny plastic teeth *cough*DS*cough*, use rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab [pineight.com] instead. It's fairly close to the method used in the official NES cleaning kit.

Practical experience reigns of theoretical in this case. As 25-35 year old can tell you, you could pull and reseat NES cartridges till the cows came home and they wouldn't work. A blow from the side though (and usually a 2nd cartridge wedged into the unit to hold the loaded one against the contacts tighter) would get it going in a jiffy.

Seems the NES was the only system with this problem though (no doubt due to their goofy front-load spring-loaded design). SNES, Genesis, N64, etc worked every time you tossed a cartridge in.

Indeed. They were somewhat rare though, having come out pretty late in the game (IIRC it was either right before, or even a little while after SNES debuted). I saw them on shelves for a while, and I know one person at school that had one, but most everyone was still using the old gray boxes.

Not every time. Once you get pissed off because someone beat you to choosing Oddjob, and in your Soda-fueled rage you kick the SNES into the TV, it no longer worked, and you had to reseat the cartridges a lot.

Not every time. Once you get pissed off because someone beat you to choosing Oddjob, and in your Soda-fueled rage you kick the SNES into the TV, it no longer worked, and you had to reseat the cartridges a lot.

That didn't happen to all you guys?

Not with an SNES. With an N64, sure...but not an SNES:-0)

We had a rule, though...you could pick Oddjob if you wanted, but whatever your kill count was at the end of the round, we got to punch you that many times.

If your console's cartridges don't have those idiotic tiny plastic teeth *cough*DS*cough*, use rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab instead. It's fairly close to the method used in the official NES cleaning kit.

true story:> Once upon a time when I was 14, I wanted to clean the connectors on my NES cartridges... reading the NES instruction booklet, and the booklets of the individual games, I learned that I shouldn't use water or alcohol to clean with, because these solvents may damage the circuit board. So instead of a $.99 bottle of alcohol, I paid $10 for a tiny bottle of cleaning solution with a crappy applicator, because it had the NINTENDO seal of approval. Ingredients contained in the cleaning solution: alcohol mixed with water. FUCK YOU NINTENDO.

Having an electrical engineer for a step dad, I always used super-pure isopropyl alcohol. Nowadays, for the odd N64 cart that needs cleaning, I generally use this stuff [crazypc.com]. It's not the same brand as I used back in the day, but::shrug:: it works just as well. When I pick up an old cart at a flea market or garage sale, I put a small bit of that on a Q-Tip and vigorously rub the contacts on the cart.

The first Q-tip usually has at least one end that looks completely black. It's crazy how much gunk can get ca

IPA is ok, but a lot of greasy particulate stuff that might have accumulated on your carts is not terribly soluble in alcohol. Better to use some contact cleaner (tv tuner cleaner). It's mostly lightweight hydrocarbons, which will dissolve non-polar material better than IPA, and it evaporates when you're done so there's no residue. I've been using the same can from Radio Shack for the past 10 years, and I have a lot of cartridges.

It's almost empty now. I've heard really good things about Deox-it contact cleaner, so I'm going to give that a try next. In any case, a quick trip to radioshack will do you a lot better than IPA.

I use QD electronics cleaner when alcohol doesn't work (it usually does.) QD is available at most auto parts stores and won't damage PCBs or plastic, yet is probably the strongest electronics cleaner I've yet used. I think it's made by CRC.

I don't see how cartridges ever went out of style. Nintendo DS games come on cartridges. PSN on PSP downloads games to a Memory Stick PRO Duo. Wii downloads games to SD. And there are even still new NES games coming out, like Sivak's Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril and ProgAce's Bio Force Ape vs. Dur Butter.

I don't see how cartridges ever went out of style. Nintendo DS games come on cartridges. PSN on PSP downloads games to a Memory Stick PRO Duo. Wii downloads games to SD.

Of course, these are all platforms where either (1) media size is critical or (2) writability is critical. Also small game sizes helps. The fact is that memory cards are much more expensive per GB than Blu-ray discs, and therefore unless there's a *major* advantage to offset this cost BD is quite clearly the way forward for any new game system. And except for handheld devices and downloadable content, I don't see it.

You just nailed it.
There could be a thousand different reasons why Rom chips would be superior to an optical disk, and in the end it would not matter. Disks are cheap to burn, and you don't have to worry about commodity price fluctuations.
Price to manufacture is the only concern that trumps all others. 60 dollars per new game is high enough, and game companies are not going to decrease their margins on games, nor will distributors or retailers. Any increase in price will be passed to the consumer.
Let's face it: We all hate load times. But we've gotten used to them.

Because CDs wear out faster than cartridges. Since cartridges don't scratch up as easily weather you want to play the game a hundred times or a thousand times you pay the same amount. While with CDs when the CD gets so scratched up you can't use it any more you either deal with not playing the game any more or you go and buy another copy. With CDs companies can charge less per disc and sell to more people but if you really love the game you end up paying a little more to play a little longer.

I don't see how cartridges ever went out of style. Nintendo DS games come on cartridges. PSN on PSP downloads games to a Memory Stick PRO Duo. Wii downloads games to SD. And there are even still new NES games coming out, like Sivak's Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril and ProgAce's Bio Force Ape vs. Dur Butter.

First, I think SD and Memory Stick cards are disqualified because they are merely storage devices. The term "game cartridge" implies that you buy it off the shelf with a game already on it.

Your customers on a satellite, 3G, or down-under Internet connection can't transfer more than 5 GB per month. So if you go download-only like the PSP Go, you may have to limit a lot of games' download size like Wii Shop Channel does (WiiWare games are no bigger than about 43 MB).

That eSata drive also has wireless capabilities that can download new media off wifi while its sitting there not being used/played.

This eSata drive is part of a subscription model that delivers an endless series of games to you. When you are tired of the game thats on there, simply press a button and it starts downloading a new game.

This eSata drive also has dongle-like capabilities which prevent you from operating the game without it, which keeps the honest people honest, just

You can always borrow/lend/trade your entire console. And if you are playing a game for which the download is free but you pay for access to the server (e.g. WoW), then the ability to borrow/lend/trade/sell the game itself is irrelevant. You can always borrow/lend/trade/sell your account on the server, but I don't recommend it.

Yes, I know I definitely want to download 20GB of assets over my broadband connection, instead of just popping in a nice optical disc or the latest solid-state storage. I mean, who doesn't want to wait days and days and days while maxing out one's bandwidth cap? Genius!

Downloadable content is the future, not bits permanently etched into chips or optical disks.

Not only is that choice of words inaccurate from an archival data management standpoint, it highlights a weakness that only downloadable content has: It can vanish at any time without warning.

I heard there were some Kindle owners pretty upset about that. [cnet.com] Imagine if Sony could delete games off your PS3... whether you purchased them legitimately or not.What makes anyone think they don't have that ability right now?

Why bother locking your doors? If an burgler can walk up your car or home, they basically have full access to it!

If the next Xbox had no support for DVD discs, and games were on a proprietary write-once disc that you couldn't read, nor write to from a standard PC, it would seriously curtail piracy for that console.

I'd be surprised if Microsoft would be willing to drop any Blu-ray or DVD playback support from the next gen X-Box. Even if games were in a proprietary format, someone would find a workaround.

Dreamcast used a proprietary 1.2 GB Disc format, but piracy was still pretty rampant because the system also read CDs (for music playback). Many games didn't fill the full 1.2 GB so they were easily ported to CD-ROM. Other games were made to fit on CD-Rom by dedicated pirates who would compress video or audio files

The format of the disk does not really add to security. The thing that provents disk copying right now is that a writable cd itentifies itself as writable (so that your burner knows that it can write to that disk). The XBOX just looks at the inserted disk and if it is a writable disk, it throws an error. The firmware hacks for the xbox work by tricking the drive into telling the OS that *ALL* disks are pressed, read only disks.

That being said, there is no such mechanism on a USB drive that can identify

...for solid-state media, for my tastes. It has connotations of low capacities and clunky housings.

But it does bring up a good question - what's the next media format? Is Blu-Ray, DVD, and CD the last family of media formats (since they can all be read by BD devices) before we go to all-online distribution? I suspect that we're done with cheap universal physical media formats in the near future.

Music stores are pretty much on their last legs, as much as it pains me to admit that. When physical game software dries up (PC or console) It has the added supposed-benefit (to the software industry) of eliminating the second-hand software market, which is something the industry has been trying to quash for what, 20 years?

Sales of physical game titles are already being replaced by sales of prepaid cards for monthly access to game servers. Prepaid iTunes download cards are also available, but I don't think that is enough to keep a music store in business.

For mass distribution of 50GB worth of mass-stamped content, BluRay is pretty good and gotten a lot cheaper than when the PS3 was first introduced. I think the "big name" games will still be on discs, the question is if we'll see anything more like a real app store for consoles. Yes, yes I know there's sorta something like that today but as a mainstream way of downloading games. Perhaps even as an alternative to discs.

Physical gaming media will not dry up in the near future - it's been brought up here in/. If the console makers won't let retailers to carry physical games, the retailers may refuses to carry their consoles altogether. The only way I can see happening is when e-commerce (online store) is so proliferate that there's a hugely reduced need for physical retailers for electronics/computers (e.g. when everybody knows how to use liondirect, oldegg..etc.).

Why don't you go get a Sega 16 if you are really caught up in the nostalgia of a cartridge. I for one am fine with the way things are going (optical disks or digital downloads to embedded storage). It's fast. It's easy. There's no time wasted blowing (the console). The future is here.

Yes, that's correct, the decrease in media prices has not helped the consumer at all. But it's helped the industry's margins, and ultimately they decide which format to distribute in, so I don't see much hope of us going back to cartridges when discs cost a couple of cents, and are universal in shape and size, making them cheap to package and distribute.

I imagine the best size for a cartridge game being the size of an old TurboGraphx 16 game (http://www.billandchristina.com/vgamecomp/images/collection5/ar/DSC01409%20%28Small%29.JPG via google). I think SSD drives would be well suited for this. However, small games like SD cards are lost too easy. Remember, the gamer with kids can heavily influence this particular section of the gaming industry.

'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"?

Cartridges will result in somewhat lower load times, for sure, but the complete elimination? I highly doubt it - The terrains of games like Oblivion and Fallout still take massive amounts of time to render in memory, and then display on the screen...The bottleneck is not necessarily the time required to simply extract it off the DVD or Blu Ray disk it resides on.

As game creators push the limits further and further with the inevitable next generation of consoles, you'll find the limiting factor in how long it takes to get up-and-running has less and less to do with the choice of optical media vs. SSD.

So maybe the thing would be to have a cartridge with a large capacity split into multiple sections, one of which would act as directly addressable memory to hold maps, textures, and other non-changing data stored the way the host OS would expect to access it.

Yup. "No more load times" is only going to happen once solid state storage sizes are so huge that assets don't need to be compressed, and so fast that it's as efficient to access them from the storage as it is from RAM.

And given that RAM access speeds are always increasing as well, and as storage increases game assets keep increasing to fill them up, I don't see this happening any time soon.

And for small games that don't have these limits? I can download an entire iPhone or XBox Live game over my broadban

The terrains of games like Oblivion and Fallout still take massive amounts of time to render in memory, and then display on the screen...The bottleneck is not necessarily the time required to simply extract it off the DVD or Blu Ray disk it resides on.

I believe this is partially due to the variability of PC hardware. You can't just program the game to load on the fly due to the fact that you can't target a certain known disc speed. The person's hard drive could be nearly full (hence a commensurate reduction in seek time due to fragmentation) or what not.

What I see happening eventually, is that every console will come with a high speed 32GB SSD as a loading cache. What will happen is that at the beginning of the game there will be a long load, and then in

The ideal gaming platform would be one where not just the game but most of the electronics that have traditionally been in the console are also in the cartridge. Mass production of cartridges would keep that affordable to the end user. The console would effectively just be the power supply and monitor and controller interconnects.This approach has many benefits including:* New games could take full advantage of new hardware and general tech advances.* Games hardware could be custom tailored for each game.*

I'm already annoyed at the Netflix app for the Wii coming on disc instead of stored to the flash (word is it may be licensing issues; the app works spectacularly, by the way).

For really graphics intensive games, we'll still be seeing game sizes in the tens of gigabytes. Flash is cheap, but it isn't that cheap (nor is the cheap stuff particularly fast. SD card transfer speeds are pretty pathetic). For most games, I think there will at least be a download option, ala Steam. Instant gratification from your purchase, and it allows for smaller, cheaper games to become popular (World of Goo).

The physical disc does have a few advantages - you can bring it to a friend's house and easily re-sell it. Still, a really nice system would simply be an "export to USB drive/SD card" option which temporarily disables the game on the console and puts a valid copy on the USB key. The USB key's copy is valid for a fixed period of time. Sales could, in principle, be done via electronic transfer (though game publishers will be thrilled to cutoff the used game market if they can do it legally).

So I think we'll see the really big games continue to get distributed on optical media (it's cheap), and more games distributed both on optical media and download. Since this last generation of consoles, hard drives have gotten much, much larger and cheaper relative to average game size. The next gen consoles will almost certainly have 1-3 TB drives built into them, standard. But ROM cartridges or substantial use of flash cartridges? I'm not seeing it.

I think you are on to something with the idea of electronic transfer. If the original publisher or platform company could handle the secondary market and take their cut, suddenly selling used games would be no problem. If Nintendo were to offer what amounts to an escrow service, where the buyer pays a small fee for the transfer and the seller gets the rest, and Nintendo gets to inspect both consoles to confirm the transfer, then they would have no argument against resale. Until someone like GameStop undercu

I suspect the only reason they don't do it is that if they will open themselves up for antitrust action to prevent them from leveraging their monopoly on resale of products, under First Sale law in which you have the right to do that anyway. You arguably don't have this right with a game which you've only paid to play, as opposed to one which you've bought on physical media; But if they give you the ability, a court might make them let others resell, and then they have to not only lose that sale, but be for

It's funny to see people thinking in terms of Media. It's like reading the old science fiction (Niven, etc.) where they constantly refer to tapes and even have the characters writing things down (they have faster than light travel but no PDAs, right). The next popular media format is already here and making rapid inroads, it's called the Internet and it's available in high speed local wired flavours (you can get a home gigabit switch for $20-40 easy) and wireless (802.11 a/b/g/n, 3G, 4G, WiMax, etc.). I'm n

You pop the game into the top of the console, so the game is sticking out the top like in ye olden times, and you could see the sweet artwork on the front of the cartridge.

DS games are like a microSD format, and are tiny. I don't think we'll see a return to bulky Atari or NES-style game carts.

More likely, downloadable games will be the future anyway. And they'll be rented content, tied to servers, and DRMed to the point that you in no way actually own the game unless you're actively paying for it and you

Consider: If Flash is cheap enough to distribute games on, it is cheap enough to build large mass storage devices into consoles with. Further, since a console is a one-time purchase, and its internal mass storage is re-usable, while a catridge's Flash has to come right out of the margins of the game, it will always be the case, no matter how cheap Flash gets, that a console can have a much larger mass storage block than a cartridge can. Simple economic reality. Unless the singularity strikes, and the numbers are "Catridge: a million bazillion petabytes, too cheap to price" and "Console: a trillion bazillion petabytes, too cheap to price" this difference will always matter.

Cartridges don't really offer any anti-piracy advantage anymore: again, because you have to fit into the margin of the game being sold, you are pretty limited in what security measures you can bake into the cartridge itself. Clones will be pouring out of China and onto ebay within moments. Any moderately robust system-level DRM is going to be in the console. And, if optical media really scare you, it is still cheaper to come up with a slight variant(Blu-Ray disks with embedded RFIDs or something) than it is to ship a cartridge. Downloads, of course, offer trivial per-download uniqueness opportunities.

Now, that said, I do suspect that the institution of playing/executing from optical media will die out in fairly short order(except for "watch once" stuff like movies. Optical media offer shitty latency, long load times, and are often pretty noisy. HDDs are faster and more capacious. SSDs are faster still, and capacity is climbing. I strongly suspect that most people would rather have a "15 minute 'install' consisting of dumping a disk image to internal storage, possibly in a compressed form that the console offers hardware accelerated decompression for, followed by fast level loads forever" to "Instant play, and 90 second level loads forever". Or, with a little cleverness, somebody could probably whip up a hybrid model: "Instant play, initially a touch slow as the disk image is dumped in the background, followed by gradually increasing speed as more and more reads take place from fixed storage, rather than optical disk".

Or the consoles themselves could simply have a solid state internal hard drive for buffering. It could easily be the case in 10 years that the console could be equipped with a 1 TB solid state hard drive and all games are just copied onto this when you first load it.

Ignore all the pooh poohers here...cartridges are so much better than discs in so many ways (other than storage capacity, but with solid state, disks would be up against some very stiff competition...no pun intended).

For one, you can trust clumsy 6 year olds with them. They're way more resilient than discs. For another, solid state memory is getting so fast it's like playing your game right off your hard drive, instead of spinning a platter at a ridiculous speed (and all the heat and mechanical issues

Given that cartridge based games seem to last about a bazillion times longer than optical disk and in most cases are much more durable, I would favor a return to cartridges. Especially considering I have Atari VCS games that still work perfectly ('70's) and PSX games that despite being carefully stored and handled do not due to data layer oxidation and other factors (early 2000's...) I think the results really speak for themselves.

Cartridges can be repaired and are much more resistant to abuse - a cart with a cracked case will still work (possibly with the addition of some duct tape) but a cracked optical disk is invariably toast. Cartridge shells can be replaced, contacts can be refurbished and cleaned, and also very importantly - game save data can be kept on the cartridge, with the game. No more "my memory card is full, but I don't want to lose any of my 100% completion RPG saves!" sort of scenarios. Also, cart mechanisms can be made with no moving parts, or at least parts that need to move during operation (loading and unloading are different stories) leading to lower power consumption and higher reliability. Hands up anyone with a Playstation of any generation with either a dead laser, spindle motor, or both?

No, but it sure would be nice to replace DVDs with flash drives. The disks I get from netflix are often unreadable. Recently, I went through seven replacements for a particular disk and eventually just gave up.

We encouter this problem a lot. The majority of the Netflix we get (6 at a time, represent!) are either historical documentaries narrated by people with British accents, silent movies, or anime. I'd say roughly one out of every six discs we receive need to be given a ride in the Skip Dr [amazon.com]. I can understand the anime and documentaries being scratched, since they are likely also gotten by people with kids...but the silent movies?!?!?! Who the fuck enjoys silent movies, but treats the medium they are contain

I've been a Netflix subscriber since 2005 and I can count on my fingers (no thumbs!) the number of times I've had to return a movie. And the bulk of those were early on when I had a crappy DVD player. On a whim, I bought a new ($20 cheapo) DVD player instead of mailing the "bad" movie back and my failures dramatically reduced. Like from 5 in a year to 2 in the past 5 years.

Granted, I'm on the "1 at a time" plan but I almost always mail back right away so end up with 8-12 a month. That's 100 a year at least,

It will probably be the future, but not next-gen. (Probably not in the next 10 years actually.) The reason is because download speeds on average in the US are nowhere near fast enough to support such a system as the primary means of delivery for content. A significant percentage of US households still don't have broadband access at all.

Game developers are already having issues with a 9gig DVD not being enough space for modern games, so the size of them is only going to go up. There's no way the US public is

Doesn't necessarily have to be. Discs are dirt cheap, but solid state is getting cheaper too. The original reason CD's took over was because they held a lot more than solid state and they were a LOT cheaper. Cartridges were faster and more durable, but that wasn't enough.

Today, solid state still has faster and more durable, and they've actually exceeded plastic disks in capacity. About all that's left is raw cost, but the difference is shrinking. If it gets small enough, it's not unrealistic to expect that the optical disc could fall out of favor.

That said, the disadvantage that BOTH of them have (namely being a physical item requiring shipment) will IMHO cause both to fail compared to downloaded content.

> That said, the disadvantage that BOTH of them have (namely being a physical item requiring shipment) will IMHO cause both to fail compared to downloaded content.

Given that download games mean:

1. Tying up my Internet connection, possible for a large number of hours.2. Having to manage my own backups.3. Not getting the game any quicker (launch titles will frequently arrive by post before I could have downloaded the game, although pre-downloaded games that just need to be unlocked might beat this).4. Payi

The prices of DVD-R (~0.046/GB) at least are getting pretty damn close to the prices of HDDs (~0.065/GB), especially when you factor in the cost of the DVD drive. With Bluray it might look a little different, but should still be quite close. Optical media just hasn't increased in space as much as other technologies.

Now of course solid state is a whole different business and prices are still more then an order of magnitude away from the price of HDDs.

Pressing a BluRay disc costs less than 3$ per disc (price for just 1000). Such a disc can hold 25 to 50 GB. A DVD is around 1$ and holds 5 to 9 GB.A 16GB USB key is at 30$ and 8GB is 15$ on Amazon. I know this is rewritable but a ROM version won't cut its cost by 90%.

So we won't see SSD replacing discs on data heavy console games anytime soon.

Why on earth are you quoting manufacturing costs in one case and retail costs in the other? Retail Blu-Ray discs cost around $25-$30 -- right around the same as your quoted 16GB USB key price. As I don't know the manufacturing cost of flash memory, and evidently you don't either, we have no basis to make a comparison.